IBM Informix

Data management

Hybrid data capabilities

Project management

The support system.

Efficiency when working with remote databases.

Public integration with open source softwares.

The SQL capability is effective.

Project management is very simple.

Data transfer speed is profitable.

No major on this system just the security setting.

Big data transfer slows performance.

Ability to manage huge amount of different data type requires a professional.

Can manage very small to very big databases

It's easy to administer, tune it and let it go!!!

It's very stable, especially if you choose to install it on Unix/Linux machines.

Improve marketing. People don't know what they can gain by choosing Informix IDS and tools

High scalability.

Easy to maintain.

Great user group (IIUG).

Highly embeddable.

Can be expensive for the top editions.

Industry leading OLTP performance.

Excellent Data Warehouse performance from the basic engine. Outstanding Data Warehouse performance from the Informix Warehouse Accelerator module.

Best embedability among major RDBMS systems.

Scalable from the smallest Raspberry PI up to the largest monolithic systems and out to dozens of distributed nodes.

Hybrid data capabilities to merge relational data with time seriesv, geospacial data, JSON data and other non-traditional data types with performance comparable or better than systems dedicated to those data types.

Honestly, not much. IBM and HCL have excellent product feature feedback mechanisms with an online system for users to offer feature improvements and suggestions. Many are incorporated in new releases. The latest includes two such user suggested features for example.

Informix since its conception has a distinct multi-threading architecture no other engine has, it is unique of its kind. This is precisely how the engine is able to scale up like no other, with the lowest footprint, without killing the host and profiting each bit of the hardware. The threads are sub-proceses like any other one, but the difference is that they are are not controlled by the OS process dispatcher. This is why you will never be able to see these threads running at OS level. Informix is an OS itself, on top of the OS.

Informix has the best replication techniques. Not many ppl know that MongoDB (the NoSQL engine) scales out because of its data sharding replication technology, and Informix is able to store Mongo BSON documents using the same data partitioning as MongoDB does. This way Informix extends the SQL or structured data with the unstructured data natively, together within the same data repository. This means that it is not only able to store JSON/BSON documents, but the engine is able to behave as it would be the MongoDB engine itself. Any application using MongoDB can be redirected to the Informix Mongo wire listener transparently. What´s more, it also improves the NoSQL (BASE) characteristic, making it ACID by allowing transactions to the CRUD operations. This last is something MongoDB is working on, promised to be delivered next year.

As described previously, MongoDB's sharding concept relies on data partitioning, this is how it scales out, and as I also described previously Informix scales up given the described multithreading unique architecture! It implements the data sharding with one of its best replication technologies called Enterprise Replication. This is an Active-Active replication technology that allows replicating even between different platforms. This is actually how I managed to migrate the whole Informix platform from Solaris to Linux, with just a DNS change. There was almost ZERO downtime nor application change - this was really amazing!.

It is very difficult to find a missing functionality in Informix, technically is great. I will again criticize the business side and how it has been managed over the past, I hope this could be improved with HCL's help. I know they are working hard, but we need to start letting the world know and revert their concept about its existence and that it is one of the best competitors within the data treatment, in the market. We need to start telling the world about success cases and stories showing this and backing up its strong technology.

Informix is very stable. It has stayed up and running for years. The only downtimes we had were due to planned power outages. This is a mandatory quality required in a industrial environment.

Informix has a very rich and extended replication system that allows many useful functionalities:

High Availability

Tables or part of tables replication, both ways

Replication patterns like 1 to many servers and sharing storage between 2 servers

All these replication techniques can be combined together and we love the simplicity of their set up.

Informix has been featuring NoSQL datatype ( JSON/BSON) for almost 5 years now, including the NoSQL MongoDB style language.

Once you have loaded your MongoDBdata into Informix, you can run any application compatible with the MongoDB 3.0 stack

The biggest advantage of this solution is that you can execute joins with SQL Structured tables and NoSQL collections alltogether, either in SQL language or in NoSQL language.

I heard recently that Informix is available on AWS, with a very wide range of configurations from very small to very big. This is something we would like to look at

Informix runs on gateway devices, like for instance Raspberry PI / Arm based nano computer or Intel Quark based. This is the same product that works on bigger platforms, including the replication architecture that makes IOT applications much easier to develop and maintain.

Informix is also directly accessible thru the REST protocol, with is a great asset for IOT applications, based on Node JS, Python, running on nanocomputers. This makes those applications much tinier in terms of resource comsumption, as well as efficient.

The name of Informix is almost invisible on the market, which is very frustrating. This give the feeling that IBM is not interested in Informix without providing any reasons for why IBM makes no effort to sell Informix.

The pricing policy is very complex